Parliament 2–The Nithya Healing Shrine

10 Nov 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

The Parliament of the World’s Religions isn’t just seminars.  There are crafts, schools, art, and other representations from the many cultures and religions that are present at the Parliament.  I went to the exhibit hall to look at crafts, books, jewelry, shawls, clothing and all kinds of merchandise from the 220 distinguishably different faiths at the conference. The exhibits room was vast, and a friend from home and I meandered around for a couple hours.  One interesting place we came upon was an imposing portable Hindu temple with golden statues and pillars, where Balasons, young girls who were brought up in a temple, were saying prayers of healing.  They were dressed all in orange, I suppose technically it is saffron.  You could get “scanned” by the third eye of the Balasons who would diagnose you and heal you.  The whole thing was frightening to me.  How does one walk up to the Balasons?  What do you do when you get up there?  What was all this?  What could a teen know about me or the world?  I was really skeptical about all this.  Furthermore, you were supposed to kneel in front of the Balasons, and I don’t kneel in front of anyone.

There were men and women loitering around the Balason temple who seemed to be part of the outfit.  I asked an elderly woman in a sarong if the girls were Yoginis (female yogis), and was told that they were higher than Yoginis.  My octogenarian friend generously did some recon for me.  She went up for a healing.  The young Balason prayed over my friend and told her to think of strength, say she is strong, and move more.  Afterward, my friend seemed to glow and did move faster throughout the rest of the day.  I thought about all this.  And decided that next day I would go up there and see what the Balason would do for me.  It was exposure to things like this that brought me to the Parliament.

Next day, I returned to the Nithya Spiritual Healing shrine, as I found out it was called.  I spoke with a beautiful middle-aged white woman in a sarong about what I was getting into.  I was thinking, “What’s a white girl like you doing here?”  But, of course, I couldn’t ask her, or so I thought.  She told me that the healing was called Nithya, and that the Balasons were disciples of the Guru Paramahamsa Nithyananda.  I inferred that the Nithya healing was named after their Guru.  A male in white Indian clothes, came up, and, when I told him I was going to write an article about this, he gave me all kinds of information.  This sect are worshippers of  ParamaShiva (Lord Shiva).  Their Guru is His Holiness Paramahamsa Nithyananda.  The Balasons have had their third eye opened by the Guru.  I decided to take the plunge.

They brought me a medical waiver to fill out.  Then I stood in line.  There was always a line all day long to see the Balasons.  Mostly women.  Standing in line, I was a mixture of skepticism, balanced with an open mind.  Today, people were sitting in front of the Balasons, instead of kneeling.  That, I could do.  My turn came.  The young Balason carried herself with authority, confidence, and detachment.  She had no ego.  She stunned me by speaking about a psycho-spiritual issue that had been plaguing me most of my life.  Then she said a second one.  And she was dead-on.  She closed her eyes and prayed a short while and said, “The healing is done.”  That meant our session was over.  She was right.  Right about everything about me—a stranger—and about the healing.  What she said to me was not the kind of general thing that would apply to everybody.  They were important issues I had, that I needed to hear articulated in words to make me understand how much of a problem it was and release I felt when it was articulated.  “Of course,” I thought.  She saw me with her third eye—me a skeptic.

Though the healing was free, they did have a donation box.  In my gratitude for the healing, I went to drop a donation into the box and saw the white woman who had assisted me with the forms and procedure.  She smiled a smile of gratitude when I dropped in my donation.  I looked her in the eyes and said, “There’s something to this!”  She smiled, saying nothing.  I knew she knew I understood.

Personal Transformation at the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions

09 Nov 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

Over the dates November 1-7, I had the privilege of attending the 2018 Parliament of the World’s Religions in Toronto, Canada—“The Promise of Inclusion, the Power of Love: Pursuing Global Understanding, Reconciliation, and Change.”  I will be posting a series of blogs about my experiences there, which were extraordinary.  I am not the same Swedenborgian I was before the Parliament.  I understand my own tradition differently, understand religion differently, understand more fully all the richness that God’s world is.  I learned in general that encountering other religions is much more than intellectually inquiring about beliefs.  I learned much about many traditions and perspectives.  But it would be a mistake to think that one now understands a tradition that others have spent their lives growing into.  The Parliament of the World’s Religions is a taste, not a meal.

The seminars were divided into 10 categories: 1) Justice, 2) Women’s Dignity, 3) Global Ethic, 4) Next Generation, 5) Countering Hate and Violence, 6) Sacred Space, 7) Indigenous Peoples’ Program, 8) Climate Action, 9) Interfaith Understanding, 10) Science and Religion.  As is always the case at these kinds of gatherings, you can’t do everything.  There are several seminars going on at the same time.  It took me about an hour and a half to figure out how to read the program guide and to decide on the seminars I would attend.

Sometimes what happens in the hallways between seminars, at conferences like the Parliament, is as valuable as what happens in the seminars themselves.  Previous to the formal opening, I had delightful conversations with a few people in the convention centre lobby while we were all looking over the 380-page program guide.  One couple from Washington State told me that they were from the Unity tradition, among other interfaith groups.  I asked them how their church was doing.  “If by ‘church’ you mean what is tied to a building, that might be questionable; but if you mean ‘church’ as a movement, I’d say it’s doing wonderfully well.”  Already, I’d learned something.  From my own tradition, I thought about what the New Church really is.  We were joined by another couple who were interfaith ministers.  They said that their outlook on religion is “not ‘instead-of,’ but rather, ‘in addition to.’”  By that I understood varieties of religion to supplement each other, rather than compete with each other for who’s right is righter than who’s.  I was off to a good start.

Attending the Parliament of the World’s Religions was spiritually transforming for me.  Such a compressed, intense exposure to leaders of other faith traditions must have a powerful impact on a seeker with an open mind.  Nevertheless, reflecting on my experiences, I realize that however intense my exposure was, my grounding is in my own tradition.  My own understanding has been given a good jolt in a positive direction.  Areas of my own faith that weren’t working for me, have been adjusted by techniques from other religions that do work.  I am enjoying seeing the world differently than I saw it before the Parliament.  I am enjoying the world more than I had before the Parliament.  I am enjoying my fellows here on earth better than I did before the Parliament.  It will take some time before I fully integrate my experiences at the Parliament into my spiritual life.

I didn’t expect to be so moved by the Parliament.  I did expect to learn and celebrate, but not to be transformed.  I will share meaningful experiences from those remarkable seven days in the upcoming posts.  It is my story, but others may find meaning in it, and may find inspiration to further investigate truths from the traditions I experienced by their own methods of spiritual questing.

Art and Societal Constraints

24 Oct 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , ,

I was moderately upset today when the classical music station where I live played only two movements of a Beethoven String Quartet.  The String Quartet is meant to be heard as a whole, not in pieces.  All four movements relate to one another and make a musical whole.  We live in an impatient world, with short attention spans, craving for instant gratification, short cuts in the movies we watch, sound bites, Twitter snippets–everything packaged in tiny packets that take up less and less time.  And our short attention span reflects these tiny packets of data.

How many people have an hour and a half to listen to the whole B-Minor Mass of Bach?  45 minutes to listen to a Beethoven symphony?  Does my classical radio station need to chop up whole pieces to package music in small bites because of today’s short attention span?

Maybe.  Our world is different than the world of Bach and Beethoven.  Imagine a world with no TV.  No radio.  No internet.  No cell-phones.  No electricity.  Can you imagine such a world?  That’s the world of Bach and Beethoven.  Imagine what time, and pass-times would be like then!  I imagine that people in such a world would have a lot of time to kill.  How long could the nobility just chat, who had no job they had to go to to fill up their day?  I imagine they would welcome a 50-minute string quartet they could listen to in someone’s chamber.  On Sundays, everyone had to go to church.  Then what?  No football games to watch.  Why not hang around the church and hear a musical mass for another hour.  Why not a cantata?  Why not a 20-minute prelude and fugue before the preacher?  They had the time.

The fact is, people in the 18th and 19th-century did have an hour and a half to listen to Bach’s B-Minor Mass.  They wanted a 50 minute symphony.  But we need to carve out time specially if we want to listen to a whole string quartet.  I’ve only heard the whole B-Minor Mass once, and it was a live performance.  As it happened, it was on a Sunday afternoon, too.  It was really rewarding.

The social forces today are different than those of Beethoven.  We can wile away time mindlessly glued to the TV, as I often do.  But I do, on occasion, set aside an hour or two in order to live with sublime art.  Art that was generated by a society that time to kill.  Art from a society much different than ours.  This blog could be considered deconstruction, if you like.

Tacit Complicity in Racial Injustice

22 Oct 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , ,

I recently attended the Christian Unity Gathering of the National Council of Churches of Christ, USA.  The theme was “A.C.T. to End Racism—Awaken, Confront, Transform.”  I entered the world of African-American experience from narratives spoken by speakers in seminars.  Being a white, suburban male, I appreciated hearing stories about the African-American experience in the US.  One speaker said that probably every African-American in the audience at one time or another, probably several times, was told to be careful in how they act and respond to white authority figures in public.  One participant who worked at a high-profile financial institution shared an experience in which he was pulled over by police on his way home from work.  He was pulled over for no other reason than the fact that his skin was black.  His race mattered more than his high standing in the financial institution.  We learned that 80% of police are white.  I recalled a story of one African-American man who told us he always has to keep his hands in plain sight whenever he enters a convenience store, so the proprietor would see he isn’t carrying a weapon.

White people like me don’t often hear stories like these.  And I think that it is fair to say that I don’t actively promote racial injustice.  But I am part of a socio-economic structure in which racism is embedded.  Statistics could be produced about income disparity, job disparities, incarceration rates, and silence in educational institutions about racial atrocities like the 1919 Red Summer in Elaine, Arkansas or the 1921 massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  I took away from a dinner speech one important idea that I took to heart.  The speaker talked about the silence of white people in the presence of racism.  By keeping silent in the presence of racism, we are tacitly supporting the structural injustices in society.  I thought about a racial slur that a man sitting next to me in a blues club made about another patron down the bar from us.  I said nothing.  I thought about the many disparaging remarks a new acquaintance made about First Nations’ people at a dinner party.  In order to ingratiate myself further in this new friendship, I said nothing.  While we may not actively promote racial inequities, by silence in the face of racism we are complicit in the structural inequities of Western society.  Awaken, Confront, Transform.  In the future, I intend to do just that.  The conference awakened me.  I have the power to confront.  And the hope of transforming.

WHERE I COULD HAVE BEEN

04 Oct 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

Recovering from a 26-year sleep

Pills, soporific pills to

Keep me out of the psych-ward

Relearning old accomplishments

Looking at my colleagues

Where they are now

Where I could have been

But for . . .

Where I could have been

Asleep

The hospital I never want

To see again

Why I was there

But for . . .

Pills, soporific pills

Spirit and Matter and Life

04 Oct 2018 1 Comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Dead matter.  That’s how I saw the material world.  My understanding of Jesus added to this world view, “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless” (John 6:63).  I understood this statement of Jesus according to the science I was raised with.  The atoms, chemicals, material compounds were all dead matter.  There was the spiritual world which is alive, and there was the physical world made up of dead matter, atoms, chemicals, material compounds.  “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.”  Even Nature was made up of dead matter.

The cells in our bodies, the leaves on trees, the soil in which plants grow are all made up of atoms, chemicals, and material compounds which are dead matter, I thought.  This world view is called Cartesian dualism.  Renee Descartes tried to come up with a theory to account for the relationship between spirit and matter.  Willing your arm to move is spiritual.  Wanting, or willing, is spiritual.  But your arm is physical.  How can something spiritual like the will affect something physical like your arm?  I’m not sure Descartes ever came up with a satisfactory solution to this problem.  But he described the problem well—movements of the soul are spiritual; movements of the body are material.  “It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless.”  Actually, Cartesian dualism actually goes back to Plato.  In Plato, there are two worlds: the world of the unchanging Ideal Forms, or ideas (ideai, eide) and the world of matter (hyle).  For Plato, what is really real, and our eternal home, is in the world of Ideal Forms; we end up on earth through a fall from the realm of Ideal Forms.  So the separation of spirit and matter can be traced way back to Plato.

While early Christians were sympathetic to Plato, notably Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa, there is a problem with Plato.  The Bible says that when God created Nature, God called it “very good” (Genesis 1:31).  Plato’s contempt for the material world is not shared by Christians.  Nature is created by God and is good; we are meant to be born here by God’s creative design.

But is matter dead?  Is the theory of matter that I grew up with true?  I am not a physicist.  But after reflection on Swedenborg’s theology, and after dialogue with a Cree elder, and from what I know about contemporary quantum physics, I think there’s only a thin veil between spirit and matter—not the drastic gulf one finds in Plato and Descartes.

Quantum physics tells us that matter is continually in flux.  Sub-atomic particles are popping into existence and vanishing out of existence all the time.  Atoms and molecules are continually vibrating.  Electrons are more a shell of probability than they are particles that are here or there.  Furthermore, matter is not solid.  Consider atoms.  The electron shell around a nucleus is like a pea in the middle of Shea Stadium.  There is that much space between the electron shell and the protons and neutrons in the nucleus.  But not empty space.  There are electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, and all manner of other forms of energy that make up “dead matter.”  Energy fields such as the electromagnetic field permeates all of the universe.  Our very thoughts are electromagnetic impulses.  Sparks.  Electromagnetic energy.  If our thoughts are electric sparks and if electromagnetic fields permeate everything—even rocks—how different are our thoughts from rocks?  From the matter in our thoughts and the matter in rocks.  Both are made up of sub-atomic particles and energy fields that are always in flux—are alive?

The veil between spirit and matter is very thin, probably porous.  Now, I don’t think matter is dead.  Now, I see God in all God’s creation.  Now I revere Nature as I do Nature’s Creator.

Kavanaugh and the Evaluation of Memory

03 Oct 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , ,

I’ve been reflecting on an incident from 1976 that is burned into my memory.  That is 42 years ago.  A very successful piano player who is my friend played one of my own compositions with me in a hotel bar.  I have an original song called “Space Blues.”  I wrote it in 1976.  One night, I sat in with my friend’s band; I played keyboard.  The band’s keyboard player had a beard, and he asked me if I wanted to sit in.  He yelled out from the audience for me to play a mambo, since he’d heard me play one before.  My friend was playing bass on a Moog Synthesizer.  The lead singer had sung on a Motown record, and he worked with my father at the Fisher Body plant in Livonia.  My friend asked me what song I wanted to play, since I was sitting in.  I told him the chords to Space Blues and the band and I started playing it.  The lead singer liked it, and started improvising some lyrics.  Actually he really sort of sang tones without words, since I hadn’t written the words yet.  I was thrilled to have this song of mine being performed in public.  I was thrilled to be playing in a bond with my friend, since I had a lot of respect for his musicianship.  Playing Space Blues in that hotel bar with my highly respected friend is seared in my memory.

Now, 42 years later, I have finally recorded Space Blues.  I sent it to my friend, the same friend who played with me in 1976, who has been producing my recordings.  He did not remember the song at all; it was as if he heard it for the first time.  I feel like telling him, “You played this song with me in 1976!”  But he has no recollection of any of this.  It didn’t make the same impression on him as it did on me.  He has played innumerable songs since, has played in countless bands, doesn’t even remember me sitting in with him that night in the hotel bar.

That’s the nature of memory.

Stanley Kubrick’s Priest

01 Oct 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , ,

Stanley Kubrick doesn’t portray the human condition as only depraved power struggles.  True, nearly every Kubrick film depicts the worst tendencies of human nature.  It is no coincidence that at the dawn of humanity, tribes of proto-humanoids fight for control of a water hole.  What propelled the advancement of humanity was the discovery and exploitation of a weapon, in the case of early humans, an animal’s jawbone.  A Clockwork Orange is essentially about one power group dominating another person or other power group.  Alex’s droogs rape, steal, and commit ultra-violence on individuals.  The prison system exerts power over Alex.  Then Scientists exert power over Alex.  Then, after treatment in a behavior-modification laboratory, Alex’s past victims find him and violently exact revenge on him.  Finally, Alex is aligned with the controlling political powers after he is restored to his rapacious previous personality.

Then there is the voice of the priest.  “Goodness comes from within,” the priest tells Alex.  “Take away free will, and you no longer have a human being.”  And after Alex’s cruel behavior modification, it is the priest again who claims that Alex is as evil as ever, he simply can’t act on his evil will.  A Clockwork Orange came out in 1971, a time in which religion was generally rebelled against in society and was often portrayed in the worst light.  The film Papillon is a case in point.  After Papillion escapes from Devil’s Island, it is a nun who alerts the authorities and sends him back to the prison Island.  In MASH, the pious Frank Burns is also an incompetent surgeon, and even blames the death of one of his patients on God’s will.  Countless other films could be adduced.

Then there is the voice of Kubrick’s priest.  The voice crying for free will in human morality and spiritual development is put in the voice of a priest.  Free-will is the essence of human life, what makes us human, the only basis on which real growth happens.  A psychologist could have made the argument in the film.  A philosopher could have made the argument.  But this truth is uttered by a priest–the representative of God on earth.  The only character who doesn’t exert power over another, is the priest, who utters the words, “Goodness comes from within.”  To me, this shows that Kubrick isn’t entirely devoid of spirituality, despite the admitted predominance of human depravity in his works.

Truth, Fact, and Meaning

28 Sep 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

The things we are most certain of mean the least to us.  The things that mean the most to us, we are least certain of.  The difference is between fact and truth.  We are certain of facts, we believe truths.  A chemical redox equation can be duplicated anywhere, any time, and the results will be the same.  A redox equation is fact.  But does it mean anything to us how may electrons switch valences?  Of course, the batteries that depend on redox equations power our cars and cell phones, and they matter a great deal to us.  But the certainty of the equation itself doesn’t matter much to me.  On the other hand, the fact that there are eternal consequences to the way I live now matters a great deal to me.  The truth that there is a loving Creator watching over me, leading me, guiding me towards eternally lasting happiness matters a great deal to me.  But the existence of God is a belief, not a provable fact.  The reality of eternal life is also a belief, not a provable fact.

I grew up in a family that thought only science was truth.  Even art was devalued.  Math, engineering, chemistry, mechanics–these were the things that mattered.  These were the things they called truth.  The meaning a person finds in a poem, was not considered truth.  In fact, it wasn’t considered at all.  In the Turgenev novel I’m reading, the nihilist Bazarov deprecates belief, the arts, and aristocratic values.  He believes in nothing.  This abandonment of belief thrusts him into science.  He thinks that only science is certain.

But there is much truth in poems, like Robert Frost’s The Mending Wall.  “Something there is that does not love a wall.”  There is a feeling in us that wants connection among fellow humans and doesn’t love walls that come between us.  But Frost is an artist, not a scientist.  I don’t think it can be proven that there is a human antipathy to walls that come between us.  But I agree with Frost.  I believe he is correct.  The Mending Wall means more to me than the existence of quarks.  Quarks can be proved, Frosts truths can’t.  Neither can God’s love for humanity, nor the reality of afterlife.  But even if the things that matter most to me can’t be proven, my life is more fulfilling when I act upon the truths I believe.  I don’t see how science can direct me to a full and fulfilling life, even if the facts it discovers are provable.  The things that matter most to humans are not provable; the things that are provable hold least meaning to us.

Contrasting Dynamics between Old and New Literature

27 Sep 2018 Leave a comment

by davidfekete123 in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , ,

I’ve recently been reading the contemporary Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, and the 19th century Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev.  I’m finding a marked contrast in the development of the stories that each tell.  I am sad to say that I fail to understand the artistry of the contemporary novelist Murakami, while I am stimulated and captivated by the 19th century novelist Turgenev.

In the first chapter of Turgenev, there are four developing story tensions: 1) youth and age, 2) aristocracy and peasantry, 3) social grace and casual social insouciance, 4) science and art.  All this is evolving through four characters.  I can’t wait to see how these tensions play out.  By contrast, I am half-way through Murakami and there are no plot tensions; there have been a long succession of characters who appear then fall out of the narrative; and the story is a succession of episodes with nothing driving them other than the main character’s fascination with a woman who has something wrong with her.

The New York Times likes Murakami, and that makes me think that I’m missing something.  But I’ve read no critical commentary on Turgenev and I’m hooked.  Am I witnessing a clash of aesthetics between contemporary art and 19th century art?  Have my sensibilities failed to keep up with contemporary culture?

In my own aesthetics, a work of art commands attention by its own presentation.  I don’t need to read a book of art criticism to admire a Rembrandt painting–or a Monet landscape.  But I do, in order to appreciate Miro.  I don’t need to read criticism to enjoy Hemingway or Turgenev or Shakespeare or Tom Wolfe.  But someone needs to tell me why I should keep reading Murakami, because the author himself isn’t compelling my attention.

With so much art, I seem to leave off with early modernism.  Perhaps I am living witness to the plot tension in Turgenev between youth and age.  But then, that would commend Turgenev’s 19th century aesthetic.

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